A study conducted at the Faculty of Sports and Health Sciences at the University of Jyväskylä showed that a genetic predisposition to greater muscle strength predicts a longer life and a lower risk of developing common diseases. This is the most comprehensive international study to date on hereditary muscle strength and its relationship to morbidity. The research used genomic and health data from more than 340,000 Finns.
Muscle strength, especially hand grip strength, can indicate an individual’s physiological resources to protect against age-related diseases and disabilities, as well as their ability to cope with them. Age-related loss of muscle strength is individual and is influenced not only by lifestyle but also by genetics.
The study revealed that people with a genetic predisposition to greater muscle strength have a slightly lower risk of common non-communicable diseases and premature mortality. However, it did not predict better survival after acute adverse health events compared to the time before illness onset.
“It appears that a genetic predisposition to greater muscular strength reflects more on an individual’s intrinsic ability to resist and protect against pathological changes that occur during aging than on the ability to recover or fully recover after severe adversity.” , says doctoral researcher Päivi Herranen from the Faculty of Sports and Health Sciences.
The research used a unique study population.
Muscle strength is a multifactorial trait influenced by lifestyle and environmental factors, but also by numerous genetic variants, each with a very small effect on muscle strength. In this study, genetic predisposition to muscle strength was defined by constructing a polygenic score for muscle strength, which summarizes the effects of hundreds of thousands of genetic variants into a single score. Polygenic scoring makes it possible to compare participants with an exceptionally high or low genetic predisposition to muscle strength and to investigate associations with inherited muscle strength and other phenotypes, in this case, common diseases.
“In this study, we were able to use genetic information and health outcomes from more than 340,000 Finnish men and women,” explains Herranen.
“To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the association between a genetic predisposition to muscle strength and various diseases on this scale.”
More research is still needed on the effects of lifestyles.
Information about genetic predisposition to muscle strength could be used in conjunction with traditional risk assessment to identify people who are at particularly high risk for common diseases and health adversities. However, more research is still needed on the topic.
“Based on these results, we cannot say how lifestyle factors, such as physical activity, modify an individual’s intrinsic ability to resist disease and whether their impact on health differs between individuals due to genetics,” he says. Herranen.
The study used the internationally unique FinnGen dataset, compiled through the collaboration of Finnish biobanks. The dataset consisted of 342,443 Finns who consented and provided a biobank sample. The participants were between 40 and 108 years old and 53% of them were women. The diagnoses selected for the study were based on the leading causes of death and the most important non-communicable diseases in Finland. Selected diagnoses included the most common cardiometabolic and pulmonary diseases, musculoskeletal and connective tissue diseases, falls and fractures, cognitive and mental health disorders, cancers, as well as overall mortality and cardiovascular disease mortality.
The study is the second publication of Päivi Herranen’s doctoral thesis, which investigates how genetics and environmental factors affect biological aging, in particular the weakening of muscle strength and functional capacity with age. The research is part of the GenActive project, funded by the Finnish Research Council and the Juho Vainio and Päivikki and Sakari Sohlberg foundations. The project is led by Associate Professor and Academy Researcher Elina Sillanpää. The research was carried out in collaboration with the Gerontology Research Center (GEREC), the Finnish Institute of Molecular Medicine (FIMM) and the FinnGen research project.